| This dissertation focuses on the generation of early managers who succeeded the founders of American corporations between 1870 and 1940. Though less familiar to many Americans than Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, or Lee Iacocca, these men, rather than the founders, were largely responsible for transforming old-fashioned business enterprise into major corporations. Reversing Alfred Chandler's claim that management's "visible hand" replaced the invisible workings of the marketplace, this study argues that managerial system building was, in essence, an invisible process. By tracing patterns of experience common to managers in every industry at a particular stage in corporate development, it demonstrates that founders made the corporation paternalistic, but managers made them entrepreneurial again to achieve integration and perpetuate growth, an invisible transformation neither perceived nor understood by the public. Three case studies, selected to provide a representative sample of American businesses industrially, geographically, and chronologically, contrast public perceptions of business with actual business practices to restore forgotten but important managers to the forefront of history and better define the corporate institution that arose from older business and commerce. Examples from the American Brass Company, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and Phillips Petroleum are used to characterize the nature of management experience that led to a new form of corporate leadership and institutional authority, and to demonstrate how organizational form and founder/manager relations shaped both evolving business practice and the surrounding community. By exploring some of the contexts in which business activity occurred, this work demonstrates that "first generation managers" are key to an improved understanding of business history, and played a central role in the process which made the corporation America's chief social, economic, and cultural institution.;Methodologically, this analysis follows in the tradition of the new cultural historians and scholars Louis Galambos, Thomas Cochran, Morrell Heald, and Alan Trachtenberg, who first directed attention to the social and cultural meanings of business history. Interdisciplinary in its approach, it contrasts public perceptions recorded in newspapers, oral histories, Chamber of Commerce and town records, with the record amassed in corporate public relations literature, corporate archives, business operations records, and managers' personal accounts. |
